Explainer
How to spot Japan's secret yen buying
Tokyo’s foreign exchange authorities have adopted an asymmetric, stealthy approach to currency market management.
World
How far will Japan let the yen fall?
The yen has reached the danger zone, sliding toward 151.8 per dollar—its weakest level in thirty-four years.
Japan raised rates. The yen fell anyway
The Bank of Japan delivered its first interest rate increase in seventeen years, yet the immediate market response was a counterintuitive slide in the domestic currency.
Japan ends negative rates
In a historic policy shift on 19 March, the Bank of Japan officially terminated seventeen years of unconventional monetary experimentation.
Japan and Britain slip into recession
Official fourth-quarter national accounts confirmed that two of the world's leading industrialized economies—Japan and the United Kingdom—slipped into technical recession in late 2023.
Special Report
Lunar New Year: China's stock market can't escape falling prices
As China enters the Year of the Dragon, domestic equity markets are finding little reason for celebratory animal spirits.
Japan wants pay rises before rate rises
The Bank of Japan held its benchmark policy rate steady at minus 0.1 per cent in January, disappointing traders anticipating an immediate end to negative interest rates.
Japan wants US Steel. Washington may say no
Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9 billion acquisition of US Steel at $55 per share represents a forty per cent premium that industrial logic can readily justify.
Japan is the last to keep rates below zero
The Bank of Japan stands alone as the final holdout of negative interest rate policy.
Special Report
Diwali: India's festive boom runs on credit
As millions celebrated Diwali across India, cash registers rang to the sound of an unprecedented consumer spending boom.
Special Report
Singles' Day: China's shoppers have lost their nerve
China’s annual Singles’ Day shopping extravaganza has long served as a glittering showcase of consumer animal spirits and domestic consumption growth.
China's hidden local debt problem
Beijing’s attempts to defuse its municipal debt crisis have entered an intricate phase of balance-sheet alchemy.
How weak will Japan let the yen go?
The yen’s relentless slide toward 147 against the dollar has put currency traders on high alert for official intervention from the Ministry of Finance.
Country Garden and the end of China's property model
When Country Garden, once China’s largest and most reputable private property developer, failed to meet $22.5 million in international bond coupon payments, the final pillar of China’s private real estate model cracked.
China's prices are falling. Its currency could be next
Deflation is officially stalking the Chinese economy, and the People’s Bank of China faces an acute monetary trilemma.
Is Japan about to loosen its grip on bonds?
The Bank of Japan remains the world’s last monetary outlier, but its grip on the domestic government bond market is becoming increasingly untenable.
Why British homeowners feel rate rises faster than anyone
The transmission mechanism of monetary policy is rarely uniform across advanced economies, but the United Kingdom offers a case study in acute structural sensitivity.
China's lending engine sputters
Beijing’s traditional macroeconomic playbook is failing to produce its customary magic.
Britain's mortgage crunch returns
For British mortgage holders, the benign era of negligible debt service has ended with terrifying velocity.
OPEC just made the Fed's job harder
On Sunday, 2 April, the OPEC+ alliance delivered an unexpected geopolitical thunderbolt across global commodity markets, announcing a surprise production cut of 1.16 million barrels per day.
Special Report
Lunar New Year: China's reopening lifts the yuan
The Lunar New Year celebration coincided with a dramatic financial renaissance for the Chinese currency.
Japan spends trillions to defend one number
The Bank of Japan is engaged in one of the most audacious institutional interventions in modern financial history.
Europe's lucky warm winter
Europe’s winter of 2022–2023 was billed across energy trading desks as a looming humanitarian and industrial catastrophe.
Germany's bond shortage is finally easing
For the better part of seven years, the European sovereign repo market was haunted by an artificial pathology: an acute scarcity of German Bunds.
Japan surprises everyone, and bonds everywhere feel it
Haruhiko Kuroda's final months at the helm of the Bank of Japan were supposed to be a quiet exercise in institutional continuity.
China reopens, and the world gets a new inflation problem
The western narrative that China's eventual retreat from zero-Covid would deliver an unalloyed disinflationary impulse to the global economy is about to collide with industrial reality.
Special Report
Diwali: India's gold habit is weighing on the rupee
As millions of Indian households celebrate Diwali on 24 October, shopping districts across Mumbai and New Delhi are witnessing the customary festive surge in gold purchases.
Britain learns the price of a budget nobody believed
The dramatic market retribution that greeted the British government's £45 billion package of unfunded tax cuts will stand as a classic demonstration of sovereign risk repricing in real time.
Explainer
How Britain's pension funds nearly broke the bond market
The sudden seizure of the UK gilt market in late September will be studied in financial history as an immaculate case study in leverage, liquidity, and structural blindness.
